Top 500 Seanan McGuire Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I will never love again, for my heart has gone to ice and ashes. Nothing more can matter in the face of all that has been lost. It is a terrible thing, to be a mother with no children. It is a terrible thing, to be alone.”

— Seanan McGuire

152. “You forgot that sometimes, fair value comes from change, and death, and sacrifice. You can’t have everything and give fair value. You can’t stop your clock and expect to stay a part of the world.”

— Seanan McGuire

153. “There’s nothing more stubborn than youth, with the possible exception of old age.”

— Seanan McGuire

154. “The thought that babies would become children, and children would become people, never occurred to them. The concept that perhaps biology was not destiny, and that not all little girls would be pretty princesses, and not all little boys would be brave soldiers, also never occurred to them. Things might have been easier if those ideas had ever slithered into their heads, unwanted but undeniably important. Alas, their minds were made up, and left no room for such revolutionary opinions.”

— Seanan McGuire

155. “I don’t want to be a monster. I refuse to be a monster. I am a person, and people get to make our own choices about whether or not we bare our claws.”

— Seanan McGuire

156. “Because they’re the wrong colors, right? Somebody else’s rainbow.”

— Seanan McGuire

157. “You must be a lot of fun at parties,” said Christopher. Jack smirked. “It depends on the kind of party. If there are shovels involved, I’m the life, death, and resurrection of the place.”

— Seanan McGuire

158. “No one should have to sit and suffer and pretend to be someone they’re not because it’s easier, or because no one wants to help them fix it.”

— Seanan McGuire

159. “I hate paperwork,” announced Andy, looking up from his desk. “How is it that we have a form for ‘you got a gingerbread house dropped on your head’? How do we have a job where that’s something you’d need a form for?” “There’s.”

— Seanan McGuire

160. “Every inch of ground on this planet is a palimpsest, scraped clean and overwritten a million times, leaving behind just as many ghosts.”

— Seanan McGuire

161. “It wasn’t fair to play games with the hearts of people who loved me. And they did love me – I had to admit that, or nothing would ever make sense again.”

— Seanan McGuire

162. “No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.”

— Seanan McGuire

163. “This has never been about good and evil. This is about power. Who has it, who doesn’t. Who knows how to use it.”

— Seanan McGuire

164. “Hope is a vicious beast. It sinks in its claws and it doesn’t let go.”

— Seanan McGuire

165. “Home always shrinks in times of absence, always bleeds away some of its majesty, because what is home, after all, apart from the place one returns to when the adventure is over? Home is an end to glory, a stopping point when the tale is done.”

— Seanan McGuire

166. “Only by learning about the journeys of others can we truly understand our own.”

— Seanan McGuire

167. “We’re all puzzle boxes, skeleton and skin, soul and shadow.”

— Seanan McGuire

168. “There is kindness in the world, if we know how to look for it. If we never start denying it the door.”

— Seanan McGuire

169. “We can be sad and we can be hurt and we can even be killed, but the world keeps turning, and the things we’re supposed to do keep needing to be done.”

— Seanan McGuire

170. “Katherine ignored her. Not maliciously: Katherine frequently didn’t hear her name the first time it was called, preferring to keep her nose in her book and continue whatever adventure she had decided was more interesting than the actual world around her.”

— Seanan McGuire

171. “I didn’t even feel my face hitting the pond. Everything was darkness, glorious darkness and the final, perfect absence of pain. It was done, all of it, the running and the fighting, and the pain. After everything that I’d gone through, it was finally over, and this time, the water would carry me home.”

— Seanan McGuire

172. “One, a shy girl with brown braids and thick glasses, had confessed that her world was at a nexus between two minor compass directions, being High Rhyme and High Linearity. Nancy hadn’t known what to say to that, and so she hadn’t said anything at all. Increasingly, that felt like the safest option she had.”

— Seanan McGuire

173. “You know what, honey? You’re right. It’s time to change my approach. Can you give me one of those nice concussion grenades?”

— Seanan McGuire

174. “This, you see, is the true danger of children: they are ambushes, each and every one of them. A person may look at someone else’s child and see only the surface, the shiny shoes or the perfect curls. They do not see the tears and the tantrums, the late nights, the sleepless hours, the worry. They.”

— Seanan McGuire

175. “Hopefully, anyone who saw a woman riding a screaming mermaid in a wheelchair down Leavenworth at a quarter to five in the morning would just think they’d had too much to drink.”

— Seanan McGuire

176. “The petty-minded fools here think surgery and butchery are the same thing.”

— Seanan McGuire

177. “Never bring a weapon too big to double as a dining utensil to the table when dining with friends.”

— Seanan McGuire

178. “Please stop using the time distortion field to age your cheese. It is an inappropriate use of scientific resources, and anyway, you can’t start with Velveeta and expect to get anything decent out the other end.”

— Seanan McGuire

179. “She considers pit traps and high explosives the appropriate solution to almost every problem.”

— Seanan McGuire

180. “I’m going to kill you.” “You look fine.” “I’m quite serious. I’m going to murder you. I’m going to murder you to death. And then, after I’ve finished doing that, I’m going to kill you again, just to be sure you got the point.” “Shelby, honestly, you look fine.”

— Seanan McGuire

181. “Not all the sparks that fly when the mortal lands and Faerie meet are bright ones.”

— Seanan McGuire

182. “Where did you find the whipped cream?” he asked. “You had milk, I had science,” said Jack. “It’s amazing how much of culinary achievement can be summarized by that sentence. Cheese making, for example. The perfect intersection of milk, science, and foolish disregard for the laws of nature.”

— Seanan McGuire

183. “There is wanting and there is needing, and when you want, you can make good choices, but when you need, it’s important the people around you not be looking to take advantage.”

— Seanan McGuire

184. “I like existing. I’m not ready to unexist just because of stupid causality. I didn’t invite stupid causality to my birthday party, so it doesn’t get to give me any presents.”

— Seanan McGuire

185. “This is how it should end. They won’t remember the way I died, but they’ll remember how I lived, forever. I was the monster under your bed, wasn’t I? I’ll be the monster waiting for your children.”

— Seanan McGuire

186. “Books were precious things, meant to be treated well, both because they deserved it and because if she didn’t treat them well, her parents might stop buying them for her.”

— Seanan McGuire

187. “That’s basically the cherry on top of this week’s sundae of suck.”

— Seanan McGuire

188. “Roger guesses people all over the world must use the same tone when they talk to the smart kids, like they were bombs on the edge of going off, instead of children with brains too big for the people they’re supposed to be.”

— Seanan McGuire

189. “People aren’t so good at being good to one another. We try hard enough, but something essential was left out in the making of us, some hard little patch of stone in the fertile soil that’s supposed to be our hearts. We get hung up on the bad, and we focus on it until it grows, and the whole crop is lost.”

— Seanan McGuire

190. “In the days when the faith in the Feathered Lords was waning, came Elizabeth Evans, called Beth, the kindly Priestess, who did find Us gathered in her yard and say Why Look At You, You Must be Starving. And she did gather Us in her apron and carry Us into her Home, which would be our Home thereafter, and say, You Are Safe Here, If You Will Follow the Rules I Set –.”

— Seanan McGuire

191. “Just because I wouldn’t go back if you paid me, that doesn’t mean I want to forget a second of what happened to me. I wouldn’t be who I am if I hadn’t gone to Prism.”

— Seanan McGuire

192. “Her parents loved her, there was no question of that, but their love was the sort that filled her suitcase with colors and kept trying to set her up in dates with local boys. Their love wanted to fix her, and refused to see that she wasn’t broken.”

— Seanan McGuire

193. “Every time I think my family has plumbed the depths of stupidity, somebody goes and finds a goddamn shovel.” – Jane Harrington-Price.”

— Seanan McGuire

194. “Do you remember what I said last night?” “That I needed to feed myself before I tried to buy Moon’s debt,” said Lundy. Her jaw set stubbornly. “That doesn’t seem fair.” “Doesn’t it? Hunger makes us foolish, causes us to make poor decisions without realizing how poor they are. If you want to help her, you need to help yourself first. No one serves their friends by grinding themselves into dust on the altar of compassion.”

— Seanan McGuire

195. “It’s not that I enjoy surprising everyone I know; it’s more that I almost never know where I’m going before I actually get there.”

— Seanan McGuire

196. “Everything was going to be perfect.”

— Seanan McGuire

197. “I had no idea what was going on, but I knew that fighting Tybalt wouldn’t get me out of the darkness. It would strand me there.”

— Seanan McGuire

198. “There are losses we don’t move past, no matter how hard we try. Some wounds, once inflicted, bleed forever underneath the skin. All we can do is learn to live with them.”

— Seanan McGuire

199. “Every world gets to make its own rules. Sometimes those rules are going to be impossible. That doesn’t make them any less enforceable.”

— Seanan McGuire

200. “She’d approached the issue of social interaction like it was another puzzle to be solved, another prize to be won.”

— Seanan McGuire